DP15276 Credit demand vs. supply channels: Experimental- and administrative-based evidence

Author(s):	Valentina Michelangeli, José Luis Peydró, Enrico Sette
Publication Date:	September 2020
Keyword(s):	bank lending channel, credit demand, credit supply, household balance sheet channel, Mortgages, risk-taking, SMEs
JEL(s):	C93, E51, G21, G51
Programme Areas:	International Macroeconomics and Finance
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15276

This paper identifies and quantifies â??for the first timeâ?? the relative importance of borrower (credit demand) versus bank (supply) balance-sheet channels. We submit fictitious applications (varying households' characteristics) to the major Italian online-mortgage platform. In this way we ensure that all banks receive exactly the same mortgage applications, and that â??for each applicationâ?? there are other identical ones except for one borrower-level characteristic. We find that: (i) Borrower and bank channels are equally strong in causing (and explaining) loan acceptance (each channel changes acceptance by 50 p.p. for the interquartile range and explains 29% of R-square). (ii) Differently, for pricing, borrower factors are much stronger. (iii) Banks supplying less credit accept riskier borrowers. Finally â??exploiting administrative credit register dataâ?? we document borrower-lender assortative matching: safer banks have more credit relations with safer firms. Moreover, the measure of credit supply estimated in the experiment (differently from a very similar measure estimated from the observational mortgage data) determines bank credit supply to firms and risk-taking in administrative data.